(Auteur) Airborne laser scanning (ALS) and terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) systems are effective ways to capture the 3D information of forests from complementary perspectives. Registration of the two sources of point clouds is necessary for various forestry applications. Since the forest point clouds show irregular and natural point distributions, standard registration methods working on geometric keypoints (e.g., points, lines, and planes) are likely to fail. Hence, we propose a novel method to register the ALS and TLS forest point clouds through density analysis of the crowns. The proposed method extracts mode-based keypoints by the mean shift method and aligns them by maximum likelihood estimation. Firstly, the differences in the point densities of the ALS and TLS crowns are minimized to produce analogous modes, which represent the local maxima of the underlying probability density function (PDF). The mode-based keypoints are then aligned through the coherent point drift (CPD) algorithm, which is independent of the descriptor similarities and considers the alignment as a maximum likelihood estimation problem. The sets of keypoints derived from the two data sources need not be equal. Finally, the recovered transformation is applied to the original point clouds and refined through the standard iterative closest point (ICP) algorithm. In contrast to some of the existing methods, the proposed method avoids the geometric description of the forest point clouds. Furthermore, additional information such as tree diameter or height is not required to evaluate the similarities. The experiments in this study were conducted in a Scandinavian boreal forest, located in Evo, Finland. The proposed method was tested on four datasets (ALS data: a circle with a diameter of 60 m, multi-scan TLS data: 32 × 32 m) with heterogeneous tree species and structures. The results showed that the proposed probabilistic-based method obtains a good performance with a 3D distance residual of 0.069 m, and improved the accuracy of the registration when compared with the existing methods.

(Auteur) Tree mortality is an important forest ecosystem variable having uses in many applications such as forest health assessment, modelling stand dynamics and productivity, or planning wood harvesting operations. Because tree mortality is a spatially and temporally erratic process, rates and spatial patterns of tree mortality are difficult to estimate with traditional inventory methods. Remote sensing imagery has the potential to detect tree mortality at spatial scales required for accurately characterizing this process (e.g., landscape, region). Many efforts have been made in this sense, mostly using pixel- or object-based methods. In this study, we explored the potential of deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) to detect and map tree health status and functional type over entire regions. To do this, we built a database of around 290,000 photo-interpreted trees that served to extract and label image windows from 20 cm-resolution digital aerial images, for use in CNN training and evaluation. In this process, we also evaluated the effect of window size and spectral channel selection on classification accuracy, and we assessed if multiple realizations of a CNN, generated using different weight initializations, can be aggregated to provide more robust predictions. Finally, we extended our model with 5 additional classes to account for the diversity of landcovers found in our study area. When predicting tree health status only (live or dead), we obtained test accuracies of up to 94%, and up to 86% when predicting functional type only (broadleaf or needleleaf). Channel selection had a limited impact on overall classification accuracy, while window size increased the ability of the CNNs to predict plant functional type. The aggregation of multiple realizations of a CNN allowed us to avoid the selection of suboptimal models and help to remove much of the speckle effect when predicting on new aerial images. Test accuracies of plant functional type and health status were not affected in the extended model and were all above 95% for the 5 extra classes. Our results demonstrate the robustness of the CNN for between-scene variations in aerial photography and also suggest that this approach can be applied at operational level to map tree mortality across extensive territories.

(auteur) Key Message: This study showed that digital terrestrial photogrammetry is able to produce accurate estimates of stem volume and diameter across a range of species and tree sizes that showed strong correspondence when compared with traditional inventory techniques. This paper demonstrates the utility of the technology for characterizing trees in complex habitats such as boreal mixedwood forests.
Context: Accurate knowledge of tree stem taper and volume are key components of forest inventories to manage and study forest resources. Recent developments have seen the increasing use of ground-based point clouds, including from digital terrestrial photogrammetry (DTP), to provide accurate estimates of these key forest attributes.
Aims: In this study, we evaluated the utility of DTP based on a small set of photos (12 per tree) for estimating stem volume and taper on a set of 15 trees from 6 different species (Populus tremuloides, Picea glauca, Pinus contorta latifolia, Betula papyrifera, Picea mariana, Abies balsamea) in a boreal mixedwood forest in Alberta, Canada.
Methods: We constructed accurate photogrammetric point clouds and derived taper and volume from three point cloud–based methods, which were then compared with estimates from conventional, field-based measurements. All methods were evaluated for their accuracy based on field-measured taper and volume of felled trees.
Results: Of the methods tested, we found that the point cloud–derived diameters in a taper curve matching approach performed the best at estimating diameters at the lowest parts of the stem ( 50% of total height). Using the field-measured DBH and height as inputs to calculate stem volume yielded the most accurate predictions; however, these were not significantly different from the best point cloud-based estimates.
Conclusion: The methodology confirmed that using a small set of photographs provided accurate estimates of individual tree DBH, taper, and volume across a range of species and size gradients (10.8–40.4 cm DBH).

(Auteur) Errors in individual tree detection and delineation affect diameter distribution predictions based on crown attributes extracted from the detected trees. We develop a methodology for circumventing these problems. The method is based on matching cumulative distribution functions of field measured tree diameter distributions and crown radii distributions extracted from airborne laser scanning data through individual tree detection presented by Vauhkonen and Mehtätalo (2015). In this study, empirical distribution functions and a monotonic, nonlinear model curve are introduced. Tree crown radius distribution produced by individual tree detection is corrected by a method taking into account that all trees cannot be detected. The evaluation is based on the ability of the developed model sequence to predict quadratic mean diameter and total basal area. The studied data consists of 36 field plots in a typical boreal managed forest area in eastern Finland. The suggested enhancements to the model sequence produce improved results in most of the test cases. Most notably, in leave-one-out cross-validation experiments the modified models improve RMSE of basal area 13% in the full data and RMSE of quadratic mean diameter and basal area 69% and 11%, respectively, in pure pine plots. Better modeling of the crown radius distribution and improved matching between crown radii and stem diameters add the operational premises of the full distribution matching.

(Auteur) Knowledge about spatiotemporal variability of climate change effect on tree-ring width (TRW) and crown condition is essential to optimize the modelling of future forest ecosystem responses to the changing climate. Geographical differences in the climate–growth relationship are a reflection of the regional climatic conditions mainly. In this study, 175 Picea abies trees from the north-western edge of its geographical distribution in Central Norway were evaluated with respect to geographical and age-dependent differences during the common period of 1950–2015. The results showed that the most significant positive correlations between TRW and the current June temperature were unstable although the temperature increased. The correlations suddenly started to decrease (regardless of the site placement and tree age) at the beginning of the 1990s, but subsequently unexpectedly increased in the 2010s. The superposed epoch analysis revealed longer TRW regeneration of the southern plots (except over-mature trees) after negative pointer years compared to the northern plots. Previous summer temperature and related physiological processes (cone crops, storage of nutrients, etc.) significantly negatively affected P. abies growth in the current year. Additionally, our results showed that the selection of the chronology version (standard or residual) significantly affects the resulting correlations and thus must be carefully considered in dendroclimatological studies. Our main outputs can contribute to better understanding of the climate–growth relationship variability and general prediction of the radial growth.